The strange uses for stimulus funds

Icelandic pollen research

Several researchers from UMass Boston scored almost $100,000 in stimulus funding this year for their proposal to use pollen to study "environmental change and socioeconomic differentiation during the Viking Age settlement of Skagafjordur, Iceland."

The National Science Foundation chose not to fund the project last year, but after the researchers revised the proposal around the methodology for collecting the pollen, the researchers received the $94,902 grant this summer.